But when it comes to marketing, B2B and B2C companies are fundamentally different. B2C companies typically:

• Have more customers and larger target markets
• Have lower average transaction values
• Have a higher average purchase frequency
• Understand the greater role of emotion in purchase decisions
• Have retail stores, ecommerce stores and use POS software
• Or if selling through distributors, may not have access to consumer sales data at all

Consequently, the marketing goals for B2C companies are very different. Where B2B companies focus primarily on sales, B2C companies also focus on customer loyalty, maximising transaction value and purchase frequency, incrementally growing the lifetime value of each consumer and gaining insights from behavioural data.

Simplicity is unique in that it offers an all-in-one CRM solution that especially caters for mid to large B2C enterprises. This means faster setup, more intuitive workflows and features designed to meet the unique requirements for B2C marketers:

Coupons, vouchers, competitions and surveys

Consumer facing brands use coupons and vouchers to drive sales, and require intuitive tracking tools to measure the effectiveness of such campaigns. They also use competitions and surveys as data collection and customer acquisition tactics and require a CRM solution to power these tactics and store the resulting data alongside customer records.

Loyalty programmes

B2C companies use loyalty programmes to maximise share of wallet and gather customer data to optimise their marketing and product selections.

Social media marketing

Consumer facing brands use social media as a one of their primary marketing channels, as their customers are often heavy users. As such interactions are a major part of the consumer experience, it’s critical to incorporate social engagement into the CRM solution for a true holistic view of each customer.

Multiple brand support

With multiple brands often comes multiple brand teams, agencies and marketing tools. In such cases brands should only access data relevant to their brand (or family of related brands), especially when third parties such as agencies are involved. Similarly, consumer opt-ins and preferences should be managed by brand, rather than for the whole business.

Contact centre

In a B2B enterprise, the sales team make and take calls. In contrast, B2C enterprises often use a contact centre.  What’s more, calls are more commonly inbound customer service enquiries, rather than relating to sales. Accordingly, B2C CRM software needs a fully functioning contact centre UI to enable agents to gain rapid access to all necessary customer data for efficient resolution of customer service enquiries. Simplicity Contact Centre provides such an interface, giving contact centre agents the right tools to resolve calls efficiently, escalate and transfer cases as appropriate and follow up on enquiries submitted via other channels.

Single view of customers

With larger number of customers and systems containing customer data, duplication across multiple systems and within systems is common. Simplicity matches all incoming records to existing customer records and merges them where appropriate. This ensures every customer exists only once in your database and all interactions with a customer are stored with that single customer record.

Complex segmentation and campaign management

Consumer focussed enterprises require more advanced segmentation functions, using engagement scores, survey responses, purchase history, brand preference, conversion propensity and numerous other dimensions.  Using these segments in practice then requires more advanced campaign management capabilities to ensure deliver a tailored message to each segment with branching campaign workflows, suppression rules, triggers and wave campaigns.

Risk of privacy and security breaches. Expensive data migration projects.

With consumer data spread across multiple agencies this can create security, privacy and compliance issues. Ensuring your suppliers all meet requirements for security and privacy is challenging when agencies change frequently and new suppliers are appointed. Data migration projects become costly or abandoned and the customer data is lost. A better approach is to use a single customer data repository, providing agencies and third parties with an API to access data. This way, when agencies change there are no costly data migration projects and you have assurance that all your consumer data is secure and meets the regulatory and best practice requirements of responsible guardianship of consumer data.

Performance at scale

B2C marketers communicate with larger audiences than their B2B counterparts. Furthermore, B2C campaigns are more likely to become viral and place rapidly escalating demands on the underlying technology. In such scenarios marketers want to capitalise on the success of their campaigns to maintain the virality and extend the reach as far as possible. Slowness, timeouts and errors quickly stop such success in its tracks. So it’s critical your CRM provider has sufficient infrastructure and application performance to deliver a flawless user experience at scale. Simplicity is designed to support even the most wildly successful social media campaigns. We manage consumer marketing databases with millions of customers and billions of interactions.

One size doesn't fit all

So when you’re reviewing CRM providers, don’t settle for an adaptation of a B2B CRM tool. Changing your processes to fit a B2B system is a recipe for frustration and vendor lock-in. Choose a system that is flexible enough to meet your unique B2C marketing requirements. Contact Simplicity and we’ll show you the difference.

Loyalty technology is developing at an ever accelerating pace. The rise of smartphones, cloud computing and big data have compounded to create exciting opportunities for loyalty programs. 

No surprise then that a flock of loyalty startups have surfaced, each with their own unique spin on rewards, incentives and loyalty schemes.  While most focus on small business, the impact higher up the food chain is taking hold, transforming the way larger enterprises approach loyalty.

Chief among the impacts of this transformation is recognition of the value tied up in loyalty data. Unlocking actionable insights from loyalty data has become a primary goal of any new program launch or program overhaul.

While increasing shopping frequency – the “share of wallet” – is still a prevalent goal, the focus on using loyalty data to drive business and marketing decisions is stronger than ever.  Recent launches of OneCard credit card, AirPoints credit cards and the FlyBuys revamp in Australia are evidence of this – new tactics to collect ever more granular customer purchase and behavioral data.

This trend, alongside the proliferation of marketing channels, has brought omniscient marketing databases back into the limelight.  Historically difficult to achieve, the goal of such databases is to capture and store all marketing data in a customer centric way – creating a “single view” of customers. With modern marketing tools more readily integrating with each other, and modern loyalty management software developing better data management features, building a single customer view database has become significantly simpler.  Products like Simplicity combine loyalty operations and single view database into a single platform, further reducing the complexity of integration.

Indeed for many of the world’s leading loyalty programs, a single view of customers has become the heart and foundation of their success. A person stored once in their marketing database – not once per brand or per card but once for the entire marketing program – enables marketers to truly understand customers and their behavior holistically. More specifically, this means individual level data about preferences, survey responses, transactions, in-bound and outbound calls completed, Facebook likes and emails opened: a full individual history of every multi-channel interaction with your business.

A single view of customers enables:

1.   Maximum relevance of marketing communications

With rich customer centric transaction and behavioural data readily accessible, marketers can use data to deliver personalised and coordinated multi-channel marketing communications.  The result is a superior customer experience, demonstrated by higher conversion rates and engagement with campaigns.

2.   Evidence based segmentation tactics

With a single view of customers we can identify, measure and target segments based on a larger and more holistic data set. Not only can we assign customers to segments based on richer data, but a greater number of segments are possible and we can measure the performance of segmentation strategies more accurately and objectively. Whether your goals are to migrate select customers to higher margin brands, maximise basket value within a segment, or win-back disengaged segments – you can measure the success of the selected tactics against evidence in the data.

3.   Meaningful metrics to measure the performance of loyalty marketing

With a holistic view of data, you can measure the performance of marketing using the metrics that matter most and attribute conversions to the right channels proportionally. Beyond opens and clicks, this means measuring the total in-store sales generated from digital marketing campaigns, life-time value of prospects acquired through social media or the bottom line contribution from the entire loyalty marketing program. It means assigning the credit for conversions proportionally across each contributing channel, so you have a holistic view of the purchase process (not just the “last-click”). With this level of insight into marketing performance, you can optimize and tailor your approach to maximise the success of each individual campaign and the entire multi-channel marketing program.

4.   Product lines that differentiate from competitors and attract more profitable customers

With a recorded history of transactions for each individual, you can identify patterns and customer behaviours that drive product design and stock selections. For example, reviewing purchase history can reveal the products that your high value customer segments buy frequently, and the products that they never buy. Stocking more products that appeal to high value segments, and discontinuing those products that don’t, will differentiate product lines over time and attract more of your target customers.

5.   Exceptional customer service

With a single view of customers, your customer service team have access to all marketing emails sent to the customer, loyalty vouchers they’ve recently redeemed, calls to the contact centre, complaints under investigation, recent transactions, posts they’ve made on your Facebook page and any other interaction. Consequently, the customer service agent can resolve queries efficiently and effectively, resulting in happier customers and lower customer service costs. 

Creating a single customer view database

While for many the benefits of a single view of customers are undisputed, the challenge is in the execution. When data is scattered across agencies, service providers, internal systems and online marketing tools this can create expensive data integration issues.

So the time to consider a single view database is when you’re launching a loyalty program, withdrawing from a coalition to set out on your own, or switching from a legacy solution to a modern loyalty platform. Treating a single-view database as an “add-on” or separate piece of technology is a recipe for inferior results and higher cost of ownership. 

But when the time comes, to fully harness the value of your loyalty data, make a single view of customers a must-have requirement. 

DIY or seek expertise?

Forecasting the cost of a loyalty program can get complex quickly, even for simple programs. If you’ve found yourself frustrated with complicated spreadsheets, agonizingly triple-checking formulas and constantly revising your model as you run different scenarios, then you’re not alone.

Once you have a financial model prepared, how can you be sure your model is accurate? Do you trust the numbers or feel a lingering sense that your estimates might compound to derive wholly unrealistic figures? Factors such as adoption rates, redemption rates, breakage, expiry, gross margin variance, supplier funding and franchise contributions quickly complicate the calculation – often requiring assumptions and estimates that can make the difference between positive and negative ROI.

Accuracy matters

A robust, accurate costing is critical factor influencing the design and long term profitability of your loyalty program, so it’s important to get it right. Read through this guide first and get in touch with Simplicity if you need support. We run loyalty programs for a big range of retailers, franchises, airlines and financial services clients – and we have a big team of friendly loyalty experts who would love to help!

Alternatively, download our whitepaper to obtain a deeper comprehension of the algorithm so you can replicate and tweak your own financial model.